


Kinetogenic

by interabang



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Mission Fic, Sibling Bonding, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 18:26:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14195025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interabang/pseuds/interabang
Summary: Gamora and the Guardians rush into enemy territory to save Nebula, only to discover that she doesn't quite need saving. At least, not at first.





	Kinetogenic

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to tag Gamora/Peter and Mantis/Nebula since they're technically background/implied ships, but I decided to tag them just in case.

Gamora meets Peter’s gaze as they crouch behind the cluster of boulders ringed around the Sh’iar tower, and she nods.

“Okay,” Peter says as he activates his mask. “On, three, two _—_ ”

The metal doors to the gargantuan fortress explode, sending shrapnel and bolts flying over the boulders as Gamora bends her head lower.

“Damn it,” Peter groans. “Rocket, you were supposed to wait until after ‘one.’”

“Since when’ve I been a fan of waitin’?” Rocket asks, his voice crackling through the comm link in Gamora’s ear.

“ _Attack_!” Drax roars, knives drawn as he thunders past Gamora and Peter’s positions, feet sending up indigo clouds of dust.

Peter turns toward her, and she knows he’s mirroring the exact way she rolls her eyes behind his mask.

She runs in front of him toward the breach in the fortress, dodging gunfire as he activates his jet boots, covering her by aiming his blasters at the turrets lining the top of the metallic, grey structure. The surface reflects light from the twin moons, but the sight is far from beautiful.

Gamora rolls to one side in the dark sand behind a large boulder as bullets rain around her. “Don’t worry about me, just go!” she yells at Peter, even though he can hear her perfectly through the comm link in his helmet.

“Not yet! There’s still a —”

“ _—_ I said _GO_!” she yells, lifting a hunk of scorched metal to shield herself.

Ahead, past the wrecked remains of the small, side entrance doors through which Peter flies, she can see Drax slicing through two Sh’iar guards, then running further into the fortress and out of her line of sight.

Another, smaller explosion from deep within the side entrance corridor rumbles out into the open air. Lifting her makeshift shield, Gamora peers up at the top of the fortress, training her focus on the remaining turret.

 _Motion-sensored_ , she notes, and readjusts her grip on the hunk of metal over her head.

“You okay out there?” Peter’s voice crackles through her earpiece.

“I’m almost in. The outer edge of this sector’s clear. Rocket,” she says, her voice strained.

Feedback whines into her ear for an agonizing second.

Then Rocket replies, “She’s here.”

Gamora watches the turret, and squats down a bit.

Then she heaves the hunk of metal as far as she can away from the door, and takes off toward it.

The turret swings downward and fires upon the metal, and Gamora flings herself through the damaged entry point.

Panting lightly, she leaps over the half-dozen felled guards’ corpses. Her left arm’s bleeding, but not much. It should heal in half a cycle.

Godslayer practically sings as she frees it from its scabbard, stepping lightly around the stains oozing across the clear metallic floors. She can hear the sounds of screams and blaster fire as she nears a corner.

Footfalls pound against the floor toward her. Shi’ar guards barking orders at each other.

Gamora smiles.

She presses herself back against the wall, and as the guards round the bend in the hallway, she strikes.

The first guard drops his gun, hands pressing against the inoperable wound that had sliced him clean in half. Both parts of him collapse.

The other guards soon follow suit.

“How is she?” Gamora asks, flicking droplets of blood off her blade as she turns around the corner and starts springing toward another blasted metal door.

“ _Let me rip his head off_!” Nebula screams, distantly through the comm.

“Oh, you know,” Rocket says, “same old, same old.”

Gamora deactivates her comm link, and races through the blown open doorway.

She finds herself in the aftermath of a small battle, housed in a circular room that was three times the size of the Milano, and with vaulted ceilings. Curved holoscreens depicting surveillance footage lined the walls: one of them smashed, two of them crackling with static. Rows of thin, tall black boxes wedged into the ground fan around the center of the room. Countless bodies litter the ground between the boxes.

Gamora slows her stride as she steps between the boxes, nearing the space in the center of the room. She catches a glimpse of Rocket studying one of the boxes, and she continues past him as he mutters to himself.

When Gamora squeezes through the final row of boxes, her breath catches in her throat.

“ _Nebula_.”

Her sister’s back is turned toward her, at the sound of her whispered voice, she whirls around to face her, her eyes blazing with a cold fury as she automatically brandishes her weapon of choice: a hand scythe.

Upon seeing Gamora, she falters.

“How did you find me?” she says, the blazing glint in her eye dimming as she lowers her weapon.

“Tracker,” Gamora says, “from the last time.”

“Ugh. I should’ve expected as much,” Nebula groans, but she relaxes her pose, ever so slightly. “How long has it been, now? Six, seven months?”

“A bit longer than that. And I’m not gonna apologize for doing it.” Gamora sheathes Godslayer, stepping forward.

Nebula opens her arms in a stilted, but almost welcoming hug.

“I told you,” she says into Gamora’s ear, “I can handle myself.”

“And _I_ told _you_ we’d make sure you wouldn’t end up killing yourself on this fool’s errand.”

“I’m so _close_ , Gamora.” Her voice would sound steady to the others, but Gamora catches the barely audible waver in her tone. It conveys all the anguish she’s been harboring for years; initially against Gamora, but within the past year, she’s redirected her vengeance upon a different target.

Gamora only says, “I know.”

“Give me five more minutes.”

Gently, Gamora squeezes Nebula’s shoulder with her hand. “You know we don’t have that long.”

After a moment of silence, Nebula nods.

They separate and turn, as one, to face the other three people in the center of the control room.

Drax has the base commander, Arnak – one of the Shi’ar generals – in a chokehold from behind. Gamora had seen him once or twice on _Sancutary II_. He’s a tall humanoid with animalistic features, though he’s standing completely still, appearing as though he’s being paid a courtesy visit.

“Don’t know why you bother dragging this out any longer,” he gasps, straining against Drax’s arms. Peter stands to his left, pressing a blaster to the side of his head. “You know I’ll never give up his coordinates.”

“We’ll figure them out,” Gamora lies, though she knows Rocket is working as fast as he can to decipher them, via the labrynth of tech housed within the black boxes.

Arnak grins, his fangs and lower lip stained red. “When you do, _she_ will go first,” he says, pointing at Nebula. “And it’ll be quick. Like squashing a pest. But _you_ ,” he slides his finger over to Gamora, and Peter digs in his blaster deeper. “Lord Thanos will make sure it’s slow, with you. It’s undoubtedly going to disappoint him, seeing you like this. Surrounded by all this _filth_.”

Gamora takes two steps forward and punches him, _hard_ , in the direction of the blaster so that it pushes even further into his face as he spits blood.

“Shame,” Arnak says, panting as he straightens his posture, meeting her eyes again. “You were supposed to be in the Order, you know. All that potential, all that training. Wasted.”

“Let me do the honors, sister,” Nebula says, staring straight at Arnak, her dark eyes blazing with cold fury again. “I won’t need five minutes.”

Gamora nods.

“Pity I won’t be there to see it when it happens,” Arnak says, lowering his hand and standing up straighter as Drax relaxes his grip and steps away, just as Peter and Gamora do. “He’ll make you two wish you were never even _born_.”

“He already has,” Nebula says as she stalks toward Arnak, lifting up her scythe.

 

 

“You okay?” Peter asks Gamora as they head down the corridor, his mask deactivated as he tentatively inspects the wound on her arm. Rocket, having been frustrated at his inability to locate Thanos’s coordinates – though Gamora knows that it’s a cover; he’s likely relieved – had rigged all of the metal boxes with explosives and set them off, so that they collapsed, toppling against each other until they all lay diagonally across each other. Peter enjoyed watching the spectacle, calling them ‘dominoes.’

She offers him a small smile. “I’ll be fine. It’s not _me_ I’m worried about.”

“Yeah,” he says, then lifts his chin in Nebula’s direction as she stalks ahead of the group. “She’s really gonna see this through to the end, huh?”

Shaking her head, Gamora steps over a couple of guards’ bodies as she says, “I can’t stop her, Peter. I want to, but...”

“... You also kinda don’t?” he asks tentatively.

She pauses as they round the last corridor and watch the others from behind as they start to head out the blasted entrance.

She’s about to respond, when suddenly, she remembers.

She remembers the turret she’d dodged upon entering the fortress.

“ _Nebula_!” she screams, breaking into a run, “Look out! There’s a _—_ ”

She’s fast, but too far away. It’s as if she’s running through Ataraxian syrup, trying to reach her sister as she steps outside, before everyone else.

Gamora senses something brush past her arm, and, almost as if she’s in a dream, she watches Peter rush forward on his jet boots as he calls out for the others to stand aside.

Feeling as though she’s still stuck in slow motion, Gamora dashes nimbly around broken bodies and pools of blood as she races down the corridor, her heartbeat thrumming in her ears as she pumps her arms back and forth.

Then, time recalibrates itself as she gazes ahead, and, in an instant, Peter collides with Nebula from behind, shoving her out of Gamora’s line of sight as bullets rain down on the sand.

In the blink of an eye, she finally catches up to the others as they huddle around the destroyed entrance.

“ _Knew_ I missed somethin’,” Rocket says, spitting onto the sand as he whips out a small electronic device and starts tapping at it.

“Nebula!” Gamora cries, barely able to hold herself back from rushing right outside.

Illuminated by the moons’ light, a blue blur rolls several yards before her and comes to a halt.

“Catch!”

Without pausing to think, Gamora throws out her hand as Peter’s metallic blaster flies through the air.

She grabs it by the barrel and, letting intuition take over, runs right out onto the sand in the opposite direction of her sister.

She stops after a dozen footfalls, pivots, then swings the blaster up toward the turret.

Gamora grips onto the blaster and fires.

Twin bursts of energy hit their target at the top of the fortress, and the turret explodes.

Gamora lowers the blaster, and, closer to the entrance, Nebula lowers the one she’s holding as well.

Gamora races over to her, and envelopes her in a hug.

“You shouldn’t be running with that,” Nebula mutters in her ear, but when she hugs Gamora back this time, her grip is tighter. Gamora doesn’t even mind that the blaster Nebula’s still clutching is digging into her back. She knows Nebula’s finger isn’t on the trigger, and the safety is on.

At least, she’s pretty sure it is.

There’s a soft sound of sand yielding under multiple footfalls: Peter touching down on the sand nearby as he deactivates his jet boots and mask, and Drax and Rocket tentatively making their way outside.

“I’m... glad you came,” Nebula whispers haltingly, and Gamora shakes her head out of sheer relief. “Don’t tell the others I said that.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Gamora says, and when Nebula’s grip on her loosens, she steps back as the others join them.

“Mantis is bringin’ the ship back ’round to us,” Rocket announces, waving his tiny radio in the air. “No need t’hike twenty clicks to the check point. Thanks for savin’ my feet, Nebula.”

“What are you talking about?” Drax asked incredulously. “You would’ve rode on my shoulder the whole way, just like you did to get here!”

As Rocket launches into a bickering match with Drax, Gamora throws Peter a look, asking him to give her and Nebula a moment, and he nods, turning back to try breaking up the argument while Gamora walks several yards away with Nebula, both still holding onto a blaster.

“I was beginning to wonder where she was,” Nebula says, in a tone which Gamora knows by now is her attempt – and total failure – to sound casual whenever she talked about Mantis.

Keeping a hand on Nebula’s arm, as if that would prevent her from slipping away again, Gamora lifts her silver brows. “Oh, you were just _beginning_ , right?”

Nebula shrugged with one shoulder. “Thought she’d be joining you in battle by now, is all.”

“She will soon,” Gamora said. “She’s making progress in our sparring sessions, but I can tell she doesn’t wish to exact too much violence.” After a moment, she adds, “She’s been asking about you, by the way. Wants to know if you’re all right.” 

Nebula exhales sharply through her nose at that, and looks away. Gamora can swear she’s smiling a bit.

“ _Will_ you be all right?” Gamora asks, and Nebula shakes herself out of her thoughts to glance back up at her.

“More or less. _Smurfette_ helped me out back there,” Nebula says, raising her voice a little so Peter can hear her. Instantly, he turns his head around toward her and Gamora, then jogs over as she holds out his gun.

Gamora looks questionably at him as she hands back the blaster she’d been holding. “Smurfette?”

“Oh, yeah,” Peter says, holstering his guns as realization dawns on his face. “That’s what I called her before.”

Gamora remembers too, suddenly, and her brow furrows as she looks at him, worrying whether it brings back bad memories for him. He meets her gaze and shakes his head slightly before he breaks out into a grin.

“Thanks,” Nebula mutters, crossing her arms over her chest as Gamora steps back a bit, giving her some room. “I guess.”

“Don’t mention it,” Peter says easily, but he’s still grinning, a triumphant gleam in his eye as he catches Gamora’s attention again.

Gamora finds herself smiling a bit too.

When Drax and Rocket finish padding over to them, Rocket glances at their faces as he throws his tiny hands up in the air. “Don’t understand any one of ya’s.”

“I do,” Drax says, looking up as the _Milano_ breaks through the clouds to descend, a bit shakily, down toward the group. “We’ve successfully broken into enemy territory. Nebula got her revenge. She and Gamora made it out alive, and Mantis is getting better at landing the ship.”

 _Thunk_.

Drax blinks, then says, “There’s always room for improvement. I seem to be the only exception.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rocket says, waving off Drax as he totters toward the lowering docking bay hatch. “I _still_ couldn’t get a d’ast read on Thanos’s coordinates, so this was a total wash, if y’ask me.”

“Well, no one _was_ asking —” Peter starts, then changes course. “I mean, you tried your best, Rocket.”

Rocket lets out a soft grunt, but waits for Quill and Drax to catch up to him as they head toward the ship.

Before boarding, Peter glances back at Gamora, who has remained on the same spot in the sand with Nebula.

Gamora gives him a small smile, and nods, lifting her chin for him to keep going.

He heads onto the ship as Gamora turns to face Nebula again.

“He… may be an idiot, that Quill,” Nebula says, digging the toe of her boot into the sand and wiggling it around a bit. It reminds Gamora of their mission, years ago, on a Zaar beach, when she’d witnessed Nebula doing the same thing while they were keeping watch on their mark. The mission had been successful, but afterward, Gamora had said something to Nebula that she can’t remember, and they ended up wrestling in the sand until the authorities showed up, at which point they had to run.

“What?” Gamora asks, having missed Nebula’s next comment.

“I _said_ ,” Nebula grits through her teeth, “he _is_ also useful. Don’t make me say it again.”

“I won’t,” Gamora says, shaking her head in amusement. ‘Useful’ is probably not the compliment Peter would prefer, but he’d been wanting to ‘make some headway’ with Nebula lately, because he knows how important she is to Gamora. She’ll probably omit that word when he eagerly asks her what Nebula said about him. It’s still progress.

And speaking of progress... “Come with us, Nebula,” she says. “You need the rest, and we’ll be able to catch up on all the time we’ve been apart.”

Nebula shakes her head, but it has nothing to do with amusement.

“Mantis will probably want to catch up with you as well,” Gamora presses.

“I’m going to Tribbite next. There _has_ to be intel there that can lead me to Thanos.”

Gamora sighs. “If he doesn’t want to be found, you know he won’t. And I don’t want to keep thinking about you in danger. I _—_ ”

“ _—_ You won’t have to,” Nebula says, but not in her former biting tone. “I owe you for this. Might not have made it out if it was just myself.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Gamora says, patting her arm. “No matter where you go, or what you decide: when you need me, I will _always_ be here for you.”

Then, regretfully, she turns away from Nebula, and heads toward the waiting ship. Her feet trudge through the sand, and her gait isn’t as light as it usually is. She feels weighed down, but if Nebula wants to continue down this path that will almost certainly lead to her destruction, Gamora cannot stop her. They had been forced into living their lives for others for so long, that she knows Nebula needs to do this for herself.

Still, Gamora wishes that she could  _—_

“Wait!”

She pauses just outside the ramp, and hears the soft sound of her sister’s footsteps nearing her.

And Nebula walks right past her, muttering, “Just for a few days...” as she heads onto the ship in long, purposeful strides.

Gamora takes a moment to breathe a sigh of relief, and walks onto the ramp to join her family.

 


End file.
